ALPHA II Alternative Public Secondary School: Toronto, Canada

ALPHA II is a public school for 7th-12th graders, founded by parents of ALPHA graduates. Based on the freeschool/unschool model, students define the terms of their own learning by consulting with mentors and other adults, and building portfolios of meaningful work. As at ALPHA, there are no “top-down” requirements that mentors (teachers) must adhere to, so all learning is “bottom-up;” students work alone or in groups, however, whenever and wherever they choose. Anyone can elect to teach a course, but there will be no tests or grades assigned.

A comfy, open classroom

On the day I visited, most students were gathered in the largest room, a sprawling space in the basement of a larger school building. There was a stand full of guitars and ukuleles, a large ping-pong table, a number of couches and loungy chairs, a wall full of computers. Students were all around the space, playing video games, chatting, sketching, playing guitar, on their phones, playing cards and board games. Throughout the afternoon various classes were offered by mentors and volunteers (a film screening & discussion on mental illness, a class on camera angles in TV production, an art class), which were open to anyone. However, students had the option to work wherever they chose; no classes are compulsory. In addition to a few large multi-purpose rooms, there is a large art studio that students can access with supervision.

Art Studio

ALPHA II’S version of democratic school is based on freeschool/unschool pedagogy: students are actively encouraged to use the school building as just one of many possible options for where their learning can occur. While some students come almost every day, others spend the majority of their days learning in the local community: there are internships at local businesses, dual credit courses at the local colleges (offering both high school and college credit), and the school was chosen for its location: right downtown, close to museums, a large park, and other cultural centers. Parents are invited to the monthly community meetings after school—students and teachers chair.

Student art

I spoke extensively with one student who homeschooled for most of her childhood. After most of her home school friends had “given up” and joined a school, she grew lonely and began to search for other options. She’s been at ALPHA II for four years now. “First year was difficult,” she said. “We have issues with kids who come in from public school and resent learning— they’re detrimental to the space.” But, she tells me that she’s helped to institute a number of policies and committees to improve the school. “You have to reexamine what you think is productive. You say ‘I did nothing’ but really you played guitar, watched a documentary. People have a rigid sense of what school is…  and think that artistic [and social] endeavors aren’t worth anything.”

She has a long list of things that she plans to learn this year: learn to drive, play guitar, take voice lessons, work on her futuristic novel, and record interviews for a project on human empathy. She’s also continuing to accrue high school & college credits to work towards a GED. “You can’t live without learning something,” she continued. “Everything is learning. Here, we’re not discriminating against different types of learning, of intelligence. ALPHA is a learning community—students and teachers alike learn from each other.”

Monica, one of the mentors, echoed the sense of community and of democratic exchange between adult mentors and adolescent students. She worked in healing through the arts before she decided to teach. After completing her degree she began working in alternative schools, but, as she laughed, “not alternative enough.” Like me, she always felt uncomfortable evaluating students, and after seeing how deep need wasn’t taken into account by “schooling:” how unhappiness, stress, and mental health were issues exacerbated by the school system, she planned to leave teaching. Instead, she found ALPHA II.

Inclusive and safe-space messaging adorned the walls

She brings her prior interests into the school environment by working around social and emotional learning: conflict resolution and restorative practices, between individuals and the larger ALPHA II community. She coordinates with the “aboriginal education centre,” a part of the Toronto School Board staffed by educators who identify as aboriginals. The center works to preserve and promote equitable education in Canada, which is the primary goal of ALPHA II: to sustain an equitable, democratic learning environment where children are “free to live & free to learn.”

Thank you, ALPHA II!

ALPHA Alternative Public School: Toronto, Canada

ALPHA, Toronto’s oldest public alternative school and only public democratic free school, opened in September 1972. The school is housed on two floors of a building shared with an alternative high school. The “little kids,” in JK through 3rd grade, have one floor and the “big kids,” in 4th-6th grade, have another. Through its 40+ years of consensus-based democracy, the school has evolved so that parents and teachers strategize to run the school. Its principal, assigned by the school board, works mostly in another school building and has a negotiated, collaborative, ‘arms-length’ approach.

The “little kids” have three large rooms, full of toys and learning materials, through which they can move at will. Children learn to read and write when they’re ready—there are no benchmarks. Teachers provide an environment rich in opportunities to suit all learning styles. The school also uses literacy and numeracy workbooks, but students work through them at their own pace. According to one of the teachers, the concrete nature of these books gives the kids a sense of accomplishment.

While children have the freedom to decline, they were certainly encouraged to engage in certain activities—I saw a parent volunteer inviting children to sit at a table covered in abacuses and other math tools. Two cherubic 4-year-olds were already seated and drawing 0s and 1s. “A hundred million! 12 hundred million! Zero, zero, zero, zero….” I watched as they taped their pieces of paper together, giggling at the enormous number they had created.

Learning is always framed as a cooperative and nonjudgmental activity, and children work together and teach each other. As one teacher exclaimed, “If you were one parent with over 20 children, it would be ridiculous to expect that you could raise those children well without help. These are the conditions in a public school classroom, and yet people continue to blame teachers for students’ failure to thrive.” While ALPHA’s open classrooms usually have 1-2 volunteers per day in addition to the teaching staff, the kids helping each other is the easiest way to make up for a ratio that is over 1/20.

That said, it’s certainly not the quiet environment emphasized in traditional elementary schools —it’s full of the noisy sounds of children playing. One little girl who was sensitive to the noisy classroom had chunky headphones on. And, since children have the freedom to move between the classrooms on their designated floors, they can find themselves a quiet nook in the hallway or another classroom if need be.

Across the hall, a group of slightly older children were working with a teacher on polishing their poems, in preparation for a school poetry night. Eight other “little kids” advocated for an adult to supervise them while they traveled to the top floor and practiced playing the gamelan, a traveling ensemble of Indonesian percussion instruments currently being shared with the high school upstairs.

Downstairs on the “big kids’” floor, I was given a tour by two gregarious 6th graders. Their huge classroom is home to Dash, the bearded dragon, two geckos named Artemis and Athena, corn snakes, and lots of plants. Learning blocks are decided democratically: students submit themes that they’d like to study, then vote. Right now, they’re working on Ancient Greece. They chose a job, (“I’m the architect who built the acropolis-- I know, I’m amazing,”) they paint, sew period costumes, learn Greek, read and write myths, and study and then create an imaginary Greek god. One of my tour guides created the goddess of chocolate, superheroes, and rock & heavy metal. (“You know Gene Simmons? From Kiss? My goddess has an axe guitar like his, it’s super awesome.”)

Their study of Ancient Greece would culminate the following week, in a living village where all students dress in the costumes they’ve made, act in character, and show off their work while the parents and younger students visit and learn. Learning isn’t limited to the classrooms: on the day I visited, teachers were taking interested students ice-skating that afternoon, and visiting a museum the following day.

Instead of assigning numerical grades, teachers conference regularly with guardians, and the school’s doors are always open for families to visit and observe the learning process. In the 1990s, the school board forced through mandated report cards even though 100% of parents were against it. Now teachers are required to write report cards and keep them on file, even though parents choose to not look at them. Hearing this, I was reminded of the vast amounts of paper work I was required to fill out for the DOE in New York City that was often filed away without being read.

School policy decisions are decided in a consensus democracy of parents and teachers. Decisions, both large and small, are talked through in monthly meetings. It took 10 years to reach a place where there were no executives—everyone has a say—parents, students, teachers. And everyone is committed to consensus; in 30 years, there has never been a situation where they gave up and had a vote. “It’s kind of spooky how well it works,” joked Deb, the volunteer coordinator.

Thank you ALPHA!

Embodying Education

I had a troubling "ah-hah" moment last week when, hours after reading research into the dangerous health consequences of sedentary lifestyles, I found myself repeatedly asking a duo of young, rambunctious students to sit down while I was subbing for a 5th grade class.

As I've written before here, one of my huge stressors as a teacher was my constant reflection on whether what I was teaching was helping my students build the structures, skills and knowledge for a happy, healthy and empowered life. Now that I've given myself the freedom to only teach part-time, I find myself with the time and emotional energy to be increasingly critical of the ways in which schools are traditionally structured. Demanding that children as young as 5 or 6 spend most of the school day seated in chairs is a criticism that I never carefully considered until recently.

We face an epidemic in this country of people who are disconnected from their bodies-- eating disorders and lifestyle diseases abound. Concerned educators push back as recess and physical education continue to be cut out of the school day in many districts. And yet, most children are asked by those same caring teachers to sit down for most of the day, even though it's apparent that for many children this is an unnatural, uncomfortable, even painful behavior. And then these children who have been trained to sit down must spend the rest of their lives fighting to relearn how to listen to their bodies, how to exercise enough, and how to fight the health impacts of the sedentary lifestyle that we trained them to adopt.

Teachers, administrators and advocates across the country are exploring this issue:

+Slate magazine published an interesting call to rethink the school desk.

+The NEA (National Education Association) wrote a lovely article recently about how fidgeting helps some students focus on learning

+Psychology Today summarizes the research on benefits of embodied education

+One young Floridian teacher purchased stability balls for her wiggly first graders, and she says they've benefitted

Do you have any ideas for how to structure learning environments where learning can be more fully embodied? Any experience or knowledge of schools that have moved on from standard desks & chairs? 

Pono: A democratic learning community. Manhattan, NY

Here's one from the nest egg... More about a handful of interesting public schools in Toronto & Ottawa are pending review!

The name “Pono” is a Hawaiian world, meaning “net” or “web” and connoting the connectedness and interrelatedness of all things. Pono’s mission, of nurturing “a journey to becoming balanced human beings,” strives first and foremost to bring awareness of this interconnectedness. It is to support children in seeing themselves as part of the big web, where any strand that they move pulls on other connected strands and effects ripple outwards. I volunteered twice weekly for the fall term.

On the last day of vacation before the fall term began, I spent the day cleaning and organizing the physical space with the other teachers. A community member came to collect a pile of wood salvaged from a down tree, promising to return with wooden benches and stools. One mother stopped by to replenish the stock of her handmade botanical lotions, with proceeds benefitting Pono.

Maysaa, the visionary founder of the school, sat down with us interns to review the policies and framework of the community, including her belief in no punishment, ever. Her wide-eyed 5-year-old daughter walked into the middle of our circle and asked, “What’s a punishment?”

Exactly. I love the idea that this child has lived through 5 years without learning what a punishment is. And it’s not that she has a small vocabulary or awareness of the world. Earlier in the day, she showed me the terrarium with the remains of a millipede and remarked, thoughtfully: “I’ve noticed that smaller animals have smaller lifespans.”

Literal empowerment—an understanding of one’s powerful effect on the world—is embedded in all aspects of the school. The staff models it constantly, and all adults engage in weekly reflections to self-monitor whether actions were in line with the principles. If anything comes up during the day that is out of line with the principles, such as an unkindness, everything stops and there is a council meeting, which doesn’t end until the community reaches consensus on a solution. According to Maysaa, most of the time the “offender” didn’t mean to hurt another child. Openly talking when there is a conflict allows the chance to clarify misperceptions and miscommunications.

Maysaa and I were able to talk extensively about the foundational thoughts behind the creation of Pono, many of which resonate with me deeply. I am so grateful for my time immersing myself in this learning community! Thank you, Pono!